LONDON: The owner of Britain’s Guardian newspaper is on track to break even by 2019, it said on Monday after announcing that the struggling publisher had cut annual operating losses by a third.

Guardian Media Group (GMG), which prints the left-leaning Guardian and sister Sunday paper The Observer, has posted annual losses since 2009 after bucking the industry trend by keeping its online content free rather than following the pay wall business model employed by rivals such as The Times.

The company launched a turnaround plan last year, seeking savings of 20 percent to stem underlying losses that had widened to 62.6 million pounds ($82 million) and aiming to break even within three years.

Central to GMG’s plans to counteract falling print advertising revenue and slow digital advertising growth were efforts to attract reader contributions and paid-for membership.

Those efforts appear to be bearing fruit, with GMG announcing on Tuesday that membership had more than quadrupled to 230,000 while readers made 190,000 one-off contributions.

Those numbers helped GMG to post full-year revenue up 2 percent and costs down by 7 percent as its loss before exceptional items dropped by 35 percent to 44.7 million pounds.—Reuters